The Alien Abduction Phenomenon: Trauma or Transformation?

by John E. Mack, M.D.

The majority of “abductees” report some degree of trauma in connection with their experiences. The intrusive events themselves may be terrifying. Experiencers feel afraid to talk about what they have undergone lest they be ridiculed and further isolated. The experiences shock their ideas of reality. Finally, they feel helpless to predict or control when the experiences will occur again or befall their children and other loved ones whom they cannot protect.

Some researchers believe that the phenomenon is primarily traumatic and harmful, that the experiencers are victims and even that the aliens, with cold indifference, are on a mission to colonize the human race and take over our planet.

But some investigators have noticed that the relationship of abductees to their experiences, and even the character of the experiences themselves, may change dramatically depending on the clinical approach that is used. If the terror is fully faced, even embraced (this requires an extraordinary holding of energy or bearing of intense distress on the part of both the clinician and the experiencer), an expansion of consciousness and a spiritual opening may take place, which includes the sense of being connected once again to a divine Source or Home. The perceived relationship with the beings themselves may shift from one of tormentor and victim to a profound, strange loving bond. Even the hybrid-making “program,” generally regarded as a consistent aspect of the abduction phenomenon (although researchers do not agree upon how literally to regard this, or in what reality it is taking place), may come to be seen as life-creating, bringing about, as one woman experiencer who had herself been “used” in this process put it, a new “balance” or “combination between us and them.”

Some investigators, while acknowledging the growth-promoting aspect of the abduction phenomenon, argue that this is a by-product of the experiencer’s struggle, the kind of growing that can take place following other sorts of traumatic experience, a testimony to human psychological resiliency. But others – experiencers and investigators alike – observe that a kind of sacred reverence for the earth and its endangered living forms, and an impatience with the apparent indifference of others to what they perceive as an urgent planetary crisis, is so frequent an aspect of the phenomenon, and such a consistent element in the communication between the beings and the experiencers, that the transformational dimension may be regarded as a central feature if not the primary “purpose” or “intention” of the phenomenon itself.

Further investigations will be needed to determine where the truth lies in this puzzling paradox.

John E. Mack, M.D. was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.